Hyperthreading Hurts Server Performance?

sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is reporting that enabling Intel's new Hyperthreading Technology on your servers could lead to markedly decreased performance, according to some developers who have been looking into problems that have been occurring since HT has been shipping automatically activated. One MS developer from the SQL server team put it simply: 'Our customers observed very interesting behaviour on high-end HT-enabled hardware. They noticed that in some cases when high load is applied SQL Server CPU usage increases significantly but SQL Server performance degrades.' Another developer, this time from Citrix, was just as blunt. 'It's ironic. Intel had sold hyperthreading as something that gave performance gains to heavily threaded software. SQL Server is very thread-intensive, but it suffers. In fact, I've never seen performance improvement on server software with hyperthreading enabled. We recommend customers disable it.'"

Comments

Been known for long time

[gasmonso]

Just doing a search for "hyperthreading problems" in Google will give you hundreds of articles about this. I remember complaints coming out right after the release of those CPUs from places like Anandtech and so on. In some cases, having hyperthreading enabled could cause a crash. Nice job Intel. I'll stick with my Athlon

gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/

"High End"! - LOL @ U

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah AMD and Intel, the CPU of choice for high-end mission critical applications. LOL WHAT? Surely everyone knows that the true big-hitters still to this day use Sparc because of its extreme scalability and value for money. Go to the server room of any top-tier investment bank and you will see what I am talking about. SUN is high end, AMD and Intel are desktop cpus always were, always will be.